It has little to do with sex abuse scandals.

David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), explained that while nearly all of the organization’s members no longer attend Catholic church services, and many convert to other religions, he did not know of any Central American abuse victims who were now Pentecostal.

More often, Professor Donald Miller said, Central American Catholics defect from the Church due to less obvious trauma.

He said they leave because their mothers do.

“I became a ‘Christian’ because my mom brought me to the church,” said Heidi Gomez, 17, a Guatemalan who had been raised Catholic until her aunt brought her mother to Pentecostalism and her mother felt “the spirit in her heart.”

Professor Miller further elaborated that Central American Pentecostals expressed views of the Catholic Church as “nothing more than a kind of bureaucratic structure led by people who have their own self-interest in mind.”

Pentecostal church Llamada Final member of 15 years Noemy Romero, an El Salvadoran living in Los Angeles, said in Spanish “the [Catholic Church’s] leaders present themselves as the bringers of God, but all they’re bringing is the Vatican.”

“God manifested himself to give the Message in Israel, not Italy,” she added firmly.

Echoing what others had said was a Catholic tendency to pray to Mary and the Saints in a way idolatrous, Guatemalan convert Heidi Gomez said in Spanish that “Catholicism concentrates a great deal on Mary and on praising Her and of loving Jesus through images.”

“Within Christianity,” she added, “we speak to God directly, to the Father. We don’t have many gods. We have one god—God.”

Llamada Final congregant Alex Avilar agreed. “Mary never did anything for me,” he said. “We recognize Mary as the mother of Jesus but not as someone who is above Christ in the spiritual aspect.”

But Los Angeles’ Archdiocese Spokesman Tod Tamberg bristled both at the Pentecostals’ characterization of the Catholic Church as well as at what he said was the fallacious idea that L.A.‘s Central Americans were leaving Catholicism.

“In the last year alone, the L.A. County’s Archdiocese baptized 104,000 people,” he said. “There are 25 dioceses in this country that don’t even have 100,000 people in them.”

And a casual glance inside the gilt covered walls and candle laden corners of Downtown Los Angeles’ La Placita Church on a Sunday mid-morning would simply reinforce Tamberg’s assertion that when it comes to a Hispanic presence within the city’s archdiocese, business, it would seem, is good.

A series of scheduled baptisms had the smaller of the Church’s chapels bustling with folk that day. Visitors clamored for a space on the pews to the point where the deacon had loudly to say “standing room only,” chiding the boisterous congregants in the process as he told them in Spanish to “settle down” and that “this looks more like a market than it does a church!”

Jose Lopez, a 40-year-old Guatemalan watching with earnest interest as he stood next to a wax model of Jesus wearing a purple sequined loincloth said that he did not think the Catholic church had been discredited as well as that he had and would always be Catholic. Speaking in Spanish, he said that taking part in and witnessing baptism was important as “in it begins salvation, for in Jesus lies salvation.”

Though Lopez used the same words to describe Jesus’ role as savior as did the Pentecostals, Tod Tamberg explained L.A.‘s Catholic Church leaders had little contact with those within the city’s Pentecostal ones as, he said, the latter group tend to use “virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric.”

“They say things like ‘we worship Mary and pray to false idols, that our priests are nothing but shams and that our faith is not built on the Bible or Jesus,’” he said.

But Alex Avilar countered with “never do you hear, well, maybe not never, but I’ve never heard it, ‘you see those Catholics, those molesters.’ That’s not the case.”

“That’s not a message of love,” he continued. “We preach messages of love. We’re all in need of god. Everyone has his own shady things, sins.”

“Church isn’t a place for saints,” he finished. “It’s the sinners who need God most.”

Whatever the Central American Pentecostals’ opinion of the Catholic Church, Donald Miller said “there’s no question at all that the Roman Catholic church is losing market share to Pentecostals.”

He told Pew that “‘In Latin America, Pentecostals are attracting many nominal Catholics. In fact, Roman Catholic clergy sometimes refer to Pentecostals as “sheep stealers.’””